Multiple network elements may be communicatively coupled to a computer network such as a local area network (LAN). These network elements may include computers, printers, copy machines, scanners, fax machines, and other devices. Each network element may possess a set of characteristics, or properties, that currently describe the network element. Such properties may include information about a current status of a network element.
For example, a printer's status might describe whether the printer is powered on or off. A printer's status might describe whether the printer is in use, ready, jammed, or out of toner. A printer's status might describe how many pages that the printer has printed. Such status information may be useful for management, support, or billing purposes.
To automatically obtain status information for network elements on a network, a monitoring mechanism may be implemented. A monitoring mechanism monitors each network element that is contained in a list of network elements. The monitoring mechanism may receive status information that is provided periodically by network elements or by actively polling network elements for status information. In response to polling, each polled network element returns current status information to the monitoring mechanism. A user may obtain the status information that has been gathered by the monitoring mechanism.
The list of network elements may be manually generated or automatically generated through an automatic discovery mechanism. An automatic discovery mechanism automatically searches a network for all network elements that are connected to the network. The automatic discovery mechanism adds to the list all network elements that respond to the search. The automatic discovery mechanism makes no determination about whether to exclude a particular network element from the list. The automatic discovery mechanism does not add to the list any network element that does not respond to the search. As a result, network elements that are not configured to respond to the search are not added to the list, and, consequently, are not polled thereafter by a monitoring mechanism.
Because the automatic discovery mechanism makes no determination about whether to exclude a particular network element from the list, a monitoring mechanism monitors all of the network devices that the automatic discovery mechanism discovers on a network. In a network to which many network elements are connected and in which polling is performed frequently, this may result in a significant increase in network traffic and degradation in network performance. Moreover, a user who is interested in viewing status information for only a select few network elements may be overwhelmed by the potentially voluminous status information through which he must search to obtain the information in which he is actually interested. For example, a particular vendor may wish to obtain status information for devices that are made by the particular vendor.
Because the automatic discovery mechanism does not add to the list any network element that does not respond to the search, a monitoring mechanism may fail to gather status information for one or more network elements for which a user is interested in obtaining status information. Furthermore, there may exist some useful information, about automatically discovered network elements, that the automatic discovery mechanism cannot automatically discover. For example, if a network element is not configured to store information about its own location, then the automatic discovery mechanism is unable to obtain location information about the network element. A user may have difficulty recognizing a particular network element based only on information that can be automatically discovered.
Based on the need to selectively obtain useful information about network elements that are of interest to a user, a method for configuring a monitoring system to monitor selected network elements is highly desirable.